Digital Certification & Blockchain Technology

The adoption of these technologies results in a secure, interconnected certification system for increased security, efficiency, and flexibility.

The Skills and Education Group unites education and skills-orientated organisations with similar values and objectives. With more than 100 years of collective experience, the Group’s strategic partnerships create opportunities to inform, influence, and represent the wider education and skills sector.

Seeking to protect the integrity of their award certificates and streamline their certification processes, Skills and Education Group’s executive board made document security and process efficiency key priorities. They concluded that successful implementation would protect the integrity of their certificates and reduce operational costs while allowing Skills and Education Group to meet changing customer needs.

What research & development was undertaken?

“Our R&D research investigated the challenges and risks of both printed and electronic certificates and how an integrated digital certificate platform and blockchain technology could work to mitigate fraud. In addition, Skills and Education Group looked at opportunities to centralise digital certificates and augment how certificates are offered to our learners.”

Key areas of research included:

• Best security practices to ensure that the security of the certificates is maintained both in print and electronic document formats
• The demand and expectations of the modern-day learner
• How to provide a flexible self-service digital certificate experience for learners and employers
• The challenges of delivering printed certificates during a pandemic and the acceptance of digital services
• What certification security means for the integrity of our qualifications and reputation
• The use and benefits of blockchain technology in certification

What were the challenges, and how were they overcome?

“Before adopting any certification solutions, our printing processes and certificates had limited security, increasing the potential risk of fraud. Also, the distribution and manual collation of certificate batches to our centres were time-consuming and costly. With the recent merger of BIIAB, we knew we needed a system that could manage hundreds of different templates and offer advanced certificate verification.

To overcome this, Skills and Education Group outlined specific requirements and implemented a robust, feature-rich certification system and blockchain paper solution that has significantly improved our security from start to finish. In addition, the certification system has streamlined our print and publish processes with auto-collation and certificate templating to manage hundreds of templates in a controlled and intuitive environment.”

How has the innovation benefited the organisation, centres, employers, and learners?

“Adopting a secure and efficient digital certification solution underpinned by security best practices for Skills and Education Group and our centres has enabled us to meet our stakeholders’ expectations and ultimately protect the integrity of our qualifications, awarded certificates, and our organisation’s reputation.

For our learners, self-service functionality provides instant access to view, order, and share their digital certificates with third parties, such as employers, from the convenience of their mobile devices, delivering an excellent learner experience. Additionally, learners receiving printed certificates now benefit from a world 1st innovation in secure paper technology, using embedded blockchain technology to create a verifiable and immutable certificate paper stock.

For employers, our blockchain-printed certificates, combined with our digital certification platform, offer intelligent verification features. These enable employers to validate the personalised data of the award using a smartphone whilst also verifying that the certificate papers are genuine and originated from the Skills and Education Group. Therefore, supporting our learner employability initiatives, ensuring employers are protected when looking to hire a Skills and Education Group qualified learner, and protecting the integrity of awards.

In summary, Skills and Education Group now benefits from a secure, efficient, and connected certification ecosystem that is focused on all key stakeholders; Learners, Centres, Employers, and other third parties.”

What is the potential for further development?

”Subsequent development is currently being implemented for additionally verifying the personalised certificate information using blockchain technology. This will use blockchain technology to ensure that tampering and manipulating the records is not attainable. Soon, we will offer blockchain documents, blockchain papers®, and blockchain badges® of any type to our learners from a single, interconnected secure certification system.”

Read the case study from the Skills and Education Group.

About Advanced Secure Technologies

Since 2004, Advanced Secure Technologies has worked to STOP FRAUD for our customers. We lead the way in best practices and set a global standard for Secure Paper and Secure Digital Certificates. Our holistic approach to developing secure certification solutions features multiple layers of security across the issuing process. This ensures our customers remain ahead of the fraud risk. As a result, our innovative and high-security solutions protect the integrity of documents issued while safeguarding the reputation of over 200 education organisations worldwide.

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